Conundrums for the Long Week-End

by Robert Kuhn McGregor

  The barest hint of service as an intelligence officer provides a bridge between Wimsey the trench officer and Wimsey the detective. Although it is never stated in Whose Body? Sayers has successfully planted the possibility that Peter’s interest in police work stems from his intelligence work. We are provided little information on the transformation, but it is plain that in 1922, when a man is found in the bathtub, Wimsey has been at this sort of thing before. He is familiar with civilian police methods and with civilian police inspectors. Charles Parker is already a close friend at the beginning of Whose Body? and Inspector Sugg his inveterate enemy. Sayers mentions Wimsey’s role in the sensational recovery of the Attenbury emeralds but provides no details. (Perhaps this “previous experience” is a partial remnant of the Sexton Blake plot reaching into the new story [14, 216].)

  In an essay published in 1937, Dorothy L. Sayers reviews Whose Body? finding the book “conventional to the last degree,” not at all the clever invention she thought it in 1923. Later, she argues, she had to go to the long labor of making Peter Wimsey “a complete human being, with a past and a future, with a consistent family and social history, with a complicated psychology and even the rudiments of a religious outlook.” In casting this revision, Sayers is not entirely fair to herself. Although at times Wimsey’s true personality could be discerned only in the barest hints and allusions, all of those elements that she would later require of her main character were established at the outset in Whose Body?38

  If Wimsey was a character ready made to step into the adventure of the man in the bath, much remained to be done before he could occupy a sensible world that his readers would recognize and understand. This was no easy task, given that the familiar world of England seemed to be changing, shifting, and metamorphosing even as Sayers observed it. To provide a proper setting for Wimsey was to capture the bustle and uncertainty of the postwar world.

  The year is 1921 or 1922—there is no precise way to date the novel absolutely—but the month is most definitely November, a typical London November filled with leaden skies, frequent and bone-chilling rains, and drizzling fogs. The weather is relentlessly heavy, a severe contrast to the forced lightness of Peter’s banter. This is the aura of the immediate post-war world, a world where sympathy and trust are at a premium. A coroner orders the windows opened, bathing his attending audience in cold fog. An attorney of the gentlemanly old school cannot recognize a bona fide visit from the English nobility, accusing Peter of attempting blackmail. Even the postwar beer is lousy. Peter’s study is an oasis of civility in the midst of a drear reality, but its master is uncertain. He can only go forward, keeping things light, burying the old wounds, hoping for the best (109–10, 188).

  The reader encounters the bustle of modern London at the very outset. The novel begins in the swirling traffic of Piccadilly Circus, as Peter’s taxi driver desperately threads past “a 19 ’bus, a 38-B, and a bicycle” to gain Lower Regent Street. Wimsey’s request to return for a forgotten catalog is more than an inconvenience; it is a request to buck the tide of a transportation network in total disorder. Returning home, he is instantly faced with a telephone call; Peter “sat down to the telephone with an air of leisurely courtesy, as though it were an acquaintance dropped in for a chat.” Technology has acquired a life of its own (9–10).

  This hectic pace of daily life remains a factor throughout the novel: there is not enough time to do everything. Following up legitimate leads, Peter nearly misses Lady Swaffam’s luncheon (his absence might have proved disastrous), and he does miss the Battersea inquest. His confrontation with Julian Freke near the finish occurs as events pass them by—the final procedures leading to Freke’s arrest are already in motion.

  Wimsey’s investigation allows the reader the briefest impression of the dizzying world of international finance. American millionaire John P. Milligan thinks nothing of sailing across the Atlantic to sew up a railroad deal, returning home to have some fun cornering the wheat market in Chicago with his brothers, and then returning to England to give a little talk at Duke’s Denver. This is a world where failure of a deal in the Argentines can upset the entire British market, where bankrupt Peruvian oilfields can inspire a flutter of excitement in London. This is all very different from the back-country images of Peter’s birthplace where “the local people can’t understand much beyond shootin’ and huntin’” (75–76, 78–84).

  This is also a world where anti-Semitism was all too current and all too familiar. Some critics have levelled the charge of conscious anti-Semitism at Sayers, but this seems a case of reading backwards from present knowledge into the contemporary evidence. Certainly Jewish stereotypes are common in Whose Body? Sir Reuben Levy, the ultimate victim of the novel, is a classic stock character. He is treated by essentially all concerned as a man apart: cheap, financially shrewd, ruthless in business dealings yet devoted to family. Everyone in the novel accepts this stereotyping without thought or comment. Peter refers to Sir Reuben as a “wandering Jew,” Bunter allows that “a good Jew can be a good man,” Peter’s mother recalls the difficulties of Christine Ford, a good Christian girl (as her very name implies), marrying a Jew. Later, medical students identify one of the dissection subjects at St. Luke’s Hospital as a “Sheeny” by glancing at the physical features. In Wimsey’s world, the Jews, resident in England for centuries, were not quite English (47, 56, 65, 195–96).

  Incorporating these stereotypes, Sayers mirrored her world, a world that in some ways had learned painfully little. Even after the cataclysm of the Great War, the world could not stand as one. In fact, the war seems to have encouraged ethnic and cultural discrimination. The Germans were still Huns, the Americans uncouth moneygrubbers (such as John P. Milligan), the French altogether too French, and the Jews still Hebrews, a race apart. How easy it was to let those ethnic slurs roll off the tongue in 1922, never thinking twice, never envisioning the evil this heedless behavior could inspire. Too many still blamed the Jews for the death of the Christian savior; too many also blamed Jewish finance for the outbreak of the war. Better to lay fault with the outsider than face up to the responsibility that rested in every European heart. Casual anti-Semitism seemed harmless enough in 1922. Even a woman as educated and sensitive to the human condition as Dorothy L. Sayers could include it in a novel as natural and innocuous behavior. Thirteen years later, she was still surprised to discover that a French translator of Whose Body? wanted “to soften the thrusts against the Jews.” She felt that the only persons in the story “treated in a favourable light were the Jews!”39 Unconscious anti-Semitism was a part of life, a condition of mind, an expression of the culture. It put the world on the road to genocide.40

  If Sayers was unconscious of the danger in her hackneyed portrayal of Jewish people, she was fully cognizant of her approach to questions of science, physical and social. These were an integral part of the coming world, and she did not altogether approve. Science, medical science especially, enters the novel in the person of Sir Julian Freke.

  Freke is a classic example of the heroic scientist, attacking the frontiers of ignorance through hypothetically impartial inductive research and application. He is an expert on the human nervous system, a selfless genius whose achievements allow him to successfully treat Russian refugees, careworn financiers, and shell-shocked war veterans. He is also a monster, a man who has placed himself beyond the moral reach of society. At first the Battersea mystery is intractable because it consists of two seemingly separate and unrelated sets of circumstances, both comparatively trivial. It is only when Peter Wimsey, in a moment of deductive intuition, splices the two stories together that he can see the enormity of what has happened. Sir Julian Freke has committed a crime beyond the scope of any moral scruple that Wimsey can imagine (168, 170).

  To Freke, human feelings and emotions are products of the body chemistry. There is no altruistic reason to experience guilt or regret; these are aberrations caused by secretions of the body in reaction to outside stimuli. To Freke, the con
cept of conscience is outmoded and scientifically insupportable. There is no soul, no God to answer to. The man who can understand, who can learn to control his body’s chemical reaction, can do anything. He becomes superman, beyond the reach of law or religion (165–67).

  Sir Julian was deluding himself. Interestingly, Peter Wimsey employs an essentially (if superficially) Freudian approach to demonstrate the flaw in Freke’s reasoning. For all his cold detachment and devotion to pure reason, the great scientist was acting under the influence of one of the most powerful and blinding of all human emotions: jealousy—sexual jealousy. As a young man, Julian Freke thought to marry Christine Ford. He was beaten out by “a little Jewish nobody.” For almost a quarter of a century, Freke bided his time, built up his plans with methodological precision. Then came the blow—revenge, at last. What part of Freke’s body chemistry had betrayed him and allowed him to cling to this paralyzing emotion? “Sex is every man’s loco spot,” Wimsey observes. “You needn’t fidget, you know it’s true—he’ll take a disappointment, but not a humiliation” (203).

  Sayers would find occasion to return to this theme, both in later novels and in some of her short stories. The message remains basically the same. Science deserves great respect because it has accomplished much for humankind. But, watch out for scientists. By its nature, science embraces no values, provides no sense of morality. In the hands of an amoral scientist, science can become a tool for unparalleled evil.

  Having established her essential characters, her settings, and the principal themes, Sayers still had to address the matter of style—no small consideration for an Oxford-educated woman with a degree in modern languages. In her own mind, as well as in the estimation of her own social group, Sayers was “slumming” to attempt popular detective fiction at all. Surely she was more at home with poetic forms if not with the “high” literature of Europe’s last thousand years. To write popular literature was to enter a different kind of world altogether, one her training would identify as a much lower form. Yet she was making her daily bread working for an advertising agency by 1922. She needed the ability to communicate with the masses just to survive.

  A voracious reader, Sayers familiarized herself with the essential conventions of the detective story by devouring numerous examples, ranging from Sherlock Holmes and Sexton Blake through the novels of E. C. Bentley. To Sayers, the essential ingredient was that the writer “play fair” with the reader. Whatever evidence the fictional detective possesses must be made available to the reader. (Sherlock Holmes did not always do this!) To Sayers, the mystery story was a form of intellectual puzzle that the reader must be given a fair opportunity to solve. The plot must be coherent, the behavior of the characters logical and believable, and the crime accomplished without resort to such legerdemain as unknown poisons, evil twins, or divine miracles.41

  The story also had to be plainly written. While many of Sayers’s readers would derive from the “smart set,” a detective story had to appeal to the “middlebrow” taste at least to be successful. This fact severely circumscribed the occasions for literary experimentation. Still, the story Sayers produced for the popular reading public of 1923 demonstrated a cognizance of the rise of the modern in literature.

  Modernist sensibilities antedated the Great War, but the war experience provided credibility for their critique of European civilization. The confident assurances of the Victorian age had given way to profound un-certainty: was humanity the agent of cultural change, or its helpless victim? Could Europeans break free from the traps, from the limitations imposed by their own history? That history had dragged them all to the edge of the abyss, a nightmare dug in the ground and called a trench. How was the artist to voice the desperate anxieties wrought by the modern world?42

  Confronting the cultural crises of the twentieth century, the moderns reflected their uncertainties in the “form and idiom” of their art. In the work of authors such as James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and T. S. Eliot, the principal narrator of the action is not so much an agent as a victim of events: “I” is “acted upon.” In composing Whose Body? Sayers seems to have struck for a middle ground between the moderns and their nonmodernist contemporaries. Her criticisms of society and the world are articulated in the accepted forms of traditional discourse, yet the narrator of Whose Body? refuses to remain consistent. Assuming a variety of voices and points of view, Sayers imposes a wealth of narrative perspectives on the action.

  The novel begins with what might be described as an imagist poem, perhaps Sayers’s only study in that style. For the modern writer, the image is a kind of epigram, capturing, with the speed and the shocking picture of the moment, “an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.”43 The image that Sayers draws to convey the essence of Wimsey is simple enough, but oddly hideous: “His long, amiable face looked as if it had generated spontaneously from his top hat, as white maggots breed from Gorgonzola” (9).

  In this case, the image recalls vermin overrunning the trenches, thereby foreshadowing Peter’s shell-shocked flashback at the moment when he solves the crime. The Battersea mystery comes too soon after the war; the gruesome horror of the truth is too vivid. The horror of the image ramifies through the text as a whole—the bizarre circumstances of the murder, dissection, and exhumation scenes to come are insinuated in this seemingly innocuous miniature grotesque.

  As the image became the staple of modernist poetry in the postwar era, the diffuse point of view came to dominate narrative literature. In the work of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, or William Faulkner, the standard Victorian narrator seems the victim of an explosion. There is no neutral, steady, reliable perspective, only a multiplicity of ill-defined, partial views supplied by unreliable participants including (and not always especially) the author.44 This fragmentation occurs in Whose Body? as well, though with careful limitation.

  Generally on her best British behavior, distanced and omniscient, Sayers nonetheless refused to remain on the outer fringes of her story. She intrudes on the narration first in the form of a few footnotes, then dares more, darting into official discourses during the inquest and then into the voices of the witnesses. When Gladys Horrocks “wished she were dead,” she has, for a bare moment, become the narrator of the action. Later, at Lady Swaffham’s tea, Sayers injects language such as “soulfully,” “anxiously,” and “little scream” into the text to accompany the exhalations of Mrs. Tommy Frayle, a woman too inanely worshipful of Lord Peter. Sayers and Mrs. Frayle achieve an odd communion in consequence. The cumulative result of these intrusions is to create a fragmented, almost disembodied narrator; there is no single identifiable narrative voice. This is a far cry from Doctor Watson (125, 150–54).

  Although she experiments with modernist perspective, Sayers drew the line at stream of consciousness. Unlike Woolf or Joyce, she seldom speaks the minds of those whose discourse she adopts. This is popular fiction, after all; there are conventions to be observed. Her reluctance to go to this extreme is clearly demonstrated in the stark impact of the few passages where she does enter the minds of her characters, exploring the effect of their thoughts on their emotions. Sayers first applies the technique in exploring the character of Mr. Piggott: “You wondered what the carpet had cost on which Parker was carelessly spilling cigar ash; your father was an upholsterer—Mr. Piggott, of Piggott & Piggott, Liverpool—and you knew enough about carpets to know that you couldn’t even guess at the price of this one” (189).

  Sayers tried this experiment just one time more in this first novel, allowing the voice of the narrator to speak the thoughts of Peter Wimsey: “The feel of Parker’s old trench-coat beneath your fingers was comforting. You had felt it in worse places. You clung now for fear you should get separated. The dim people moving in front of you were like Brocken specters.” (223)

  The profoundly physical sensations she records separate the narrator from the character even as the words unite their experience. The narrator is not Piggott, not Wimsey, however close the narrato
r (and the reader) come to sharing the experience. The message is Freudian: there exist unfathomable depths within one’s own mind. Viewpoints may shift, but in the last analysis all is relative. Even the world of the fictional detective is ultimately unknowable.45

  If Dorothy L. Sayers was willing to toy with the relativistic stratagems of the moderns, her detective fiction was rooted in her finely honed sense of the classics, one more characteristic she shared with Eliot and Joyce. Subsequent Lord Peter novels drew heavily from Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Milton, John Donne, and always from Wilkie Collins. In Whose Body? the action is framed by references to Dante. As the novel begins, Peter Wimsey is the wealthy and garrulous man about town, off to bid for a Folio Dante to add to his collection. The Folio arrives as the investigation deepens; it is available for inspection by Mr. Piggott as the circle closes around Sir Julian Freke. With resolution of the matter out of his hands, Wimsey attempts to draw solace from Dante. Instead, he determines to confront Sir Julian. By the climax, Sayers has imported images from Dante directly into her story to lend a sense of decency to the grim proceedings at the workhouse burial ground. Wandering amidst the maze of graves, Wimsey clings to Parker’s coat sleeve to keep from blundering into “the mass of freshly turned clay” about an open grave.